


Try to Try Hard

by yet_intrepid



Series: say we're only dreaming [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Aladdin (1992) Fusion, Amputation, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dubious First Aid, Gen, Hurt Everybody TBH, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt Shiro (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Protective Keith (Voltron), Sad Shiro (Voltron), Shiro Week 2017, THERE IS A REASON HUNK IS NOT HERE OK, fuck the police: aladdin au edition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 01:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12783714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: “Shiro,” Keith says, and he tries to be calm. “Are you…okay?”Shiro lifts his head a little. Keith has never seen him so pale. The blood is still pumping out and Keith can’t stop staring at it. He should fix it. He should fix it. He doesn’t know how.[Shiro loses his hand, Aladdin AU edition. Written for Shiro Week Day 3: Break/Mend and Day 5: Isolation/Companion.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Proud of Your Boy," a very sweet and sad song that was cut from the Aladdin Disney film and restored to the musical. Go listen to it. 
> 
> Comfort half comes tomorrow!

Shiro isn’t struggling when they bring him out. He looks scared, and Keith’s never seen Shiro look that way before, but he isn’t fighting the guards who have their hands on him, pushing him out into the square. The square where the stocks are, and the gallows.

For a minute Keith is scared too, too scared to move. But then the anger gets the better of him and he runs for Shiro.

“Shiro,” he yells, and the guards round on him. There’s the handle of a spear and Keith trips and gets hit and falls, still yelling his friend’s name.

“Hey,” Shiro is saying, and Keith, sprawled on the stones of the city square, looks up at him. Shiro’s pale and he still looks scared, but he sounds okay. He sounds put together, ready to tell Keith what to do and how to make everything better.

“Keith,” Shiro says. He’s calling over his shoulder as the guards wrestle him away. “Keith, listen, okay, I need you to do two things for me. Two things, okay?”

“Okay,” says Keith. He thinks maybe he should get up and help, get Shiro free, but Shiro’s calm voice keeps him still.

“Two things,” Shiro repeats. The guards push him to his knees by the stocks—not on the bench, like he’s going to get left there, but next to it. “When it happens, I need you to close your eyes.”

“Close my—” Keith starts to say, because Shiro isn’t making sense. When _what_ happens? What’s going to happen?

“Close your eyes.” Shiro’s still firm, even as the guards stretch one of his arms out on the bench. Even as they bind it in place there, and Keith can see him shaking, Shiro’s still firm. “And two—”

“Wait,” Keith says. “Wait, no, I’m not going to—”

Because everything’s started to blur as it dawns on him: Shiro’s going to lose his hand. The guards have an axe, big and sharp and gleaming, and Keith wants to scream or throw up or get himself killed fighting against this because it’s awful and Shiro doesn’t deserve it. Keith’s only twelve and Shiro’s only fourteen and they’re kids, okay, they’re trying their best and they wouldn’t steal if they didn’t have to, really, and it was Keith who went and messed up the plan, too. Not Shiro. Never Shiro. Shiro would never be so stupid, never fuck up like that.

The only way Shiro is stupid is the way he always takes the fall for Keith.

“Two,” Shiro is saying, when Keith can hear again. “I need you to help me, Keith, after they do it, okay? I need you to help me get home.”

Keith tries to pull himself back, tries to listen. He’s got to help Shiro, because this is his fault, this whole thing. He wants to fight the guards and get Shiro untied from that stupid bench, but he’s only twelve and he’s small and the guards have lots of weapons. It wouldn’t help Shiro for Keith to get killed or hauled off to jail.

So Keith gets to his feet, looks Shiro in the eye, and lifts his chin. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” and he means it.

“Close your eyes,” Shiro says again.

“Okay,” says Keith. He starts backing away from the stocks and the bench and Shiro’s bound arm, away from the axe that’s glittering too close by.

“And then help me home.”

“Okay.” Keith finds himself a place at the inner edge of the growing circle of curious passerby. There’s two kids about his age beside him, almost identical even though they might not be the same gender, and they’re looking at him with matching looks that Keith can’t read.

Keith scowls at them, folds his arms around himself, and keeps his eyes fixed on Shiro. One of the guards starts talking, droning on about stealing and youth these days and criminal activity. Keith tunes it out, because Shiro’s starting to look even more scared. Even from this distance, Keith can see him trembling.

Close your eyes, he reminds himself. That’s what Shiro said.

But even though he does—even though when the axe goes up he squeezes his eyelids tight and turns away—he still hears it. Metal-on-bone, Shiro screaming raggedly.

When he opens his eyes again, there’s blood. There’s so much blood.

It’s like the world is spinning, spinning and red. It’s like Shiro was the only constant holding Keith in place, his hand on Keith’s shoulder keeping all the anger and fear at bay. It’s like Keith is the older one now, the one in charge, the one who’s responsible. The one who should’ve gotten punished, but didn’t.

It’s like everything is over, time spinning in his head.

Keith thinks all these things and then he sees Shiro again, crumpled over the bench. The guards undo the ropes and leave him there, and Keith wants to wrench that axe away from them and heave it around until they all lose their hands, too. But he doesn’t. Shiro told him what he has to do, and the least Keith can do is follow that.

So instead of yelling, instead of fighting the guards, he crosses the square and crouches at Shiro’s side. Puts a hand on his friend’s shaking shoulder.

“Shiro,” he says, and he tries to be calm. “Are you…okay?”

Shiro lifts his head a little. Keith has never seen him so pale. The blood is still pumping out and Keith can’t stop staring at it. He should fix it. He should fix it. He doesn’t know how.

Then somebody’s shoving him aside and Keith shouts, ready to fight, but it’s not a guard. It’s someone not much bigger than him, holding onto his shoulders, while one of the almost-identical kids he saw before picks up Shiro’s arm.

Shiro screams.

“No,” Keith cries, desperate. “No, don’t, you’re hurting him—” but the hands on his shoulders keep him from rushing in. The person bending over Shiro ties two tourniquets into place, one above the elbow and the other just above the raw stump. Shiro screams some more, then goes limp.

He’s dead, Keith thinks, but he can’t be dead.

“We need to get out of here,” says the taller of the almost-identical people, the one with Shiro’s blood all over. “Pidge, help me carry him.”

Pidge stops hanging onto Keith. “Sure.”

“Wait,” Keith manages to say. “Don’t—don’t take him away. You can’t take him away.”

The other one, not Pidge, raises an eyebrow. “No offense,” he says, “but how were you planning to get this guy out of the town square?”

Keith glares. “I—”

“That’s why we’re here,” puts in Pidge.

“Surgeon’s apprentices here to save the day.” The taller one comes in on cue, voice tired. “I’m Matt, and this my sister Pidge.”

“Oh,” says Keith, and then, “I’m Keith.”

“We’re going to take him to the backroom of the surgeon’s if that’s okay,” Matt continues. “There’s medical supplies there, and he’ll be able to rest. Is there somewhere else you’d rather go, though?”

Keith thinks of their attic hideaway, the tree they use as a stairwell. Shiro couldn’t get up it; there’s no way.

“No,” he says. “But I…I can’t pay you.”

“You don’t have to,” Pidge says. “My brother’s nice like that. Now come on, help us carry this guy.”

Somehow, they manage to support Shiro’s unconscious body to the surgeon’s. It’s not far, barely two minutes’ walk, but Keith is still relieved when they stumble into the alleyway and through the back entrance. The room Pidge points them to is tiny, barely fitting the two straw mattresses on the floor. They lower Shiro onto one. Matt pushes Keith down to sit on the other and disappears, whispering to Pidge about supplies.

Keith sits there. Waits. Wonders if Shiro will ever wake up again.

\----

Shiro isn’t sure where he is.

There are hands, touching him, gentle through the pain that swirls behind his eyelids, radiates in his bones. There are hands, voices, and for a minute he thinks it’s his mom, that he’s home and safe.

But that’s not right. It can’t be. His mom is dead.

So he doesn’t know where he is, but he’s too tired to lift his stone-heavy eyelids. When he concentrates, though, he hears a voice he recognizes.

“He’ll wake up, right?”

Shiro recognizes it. He does. He just can’t say who it is, can’t find the name in the maze of his brain.

“Course he will,” puts in another voice, one he definitely doesn’t know. A girl, maybe. “Got a steady pulse and everything.”

The first voice doesn’t reply, but Shiro can almost picture the person who matches it. Someone with a furrowed forehead, worry in the scrunch of his nose. Long black hair obscuring his eyes.

“Hand me that?” the second voice says, and then the hands land—gently, still gently, even though he flinches back from them—right where the stabbing pain comes from. Shiro isn’t sure if he screams or not. He tries. He tries to move, too, but his body is heavy and weak.

The hands flit away again. Maybe he did scream, Shiro thinks, but then they’re back, wrapping soft cloth around—his arm? He’s pretty sure it’s his arm. He thinks hard about his arm.

He thinks about his hand, too, but he still can’t feel it.

He _can’t feel his hand_. It takes him a moment to realize what that means.

And then he screams, definitely for real this time, not even because it hurts but just because he’s scared, scared like a baby left in a stranger’s arms, scared like a parent who doesn’t know how they’ll take care of their kid, scared, scared—

“Shiro!” says the first voice, and Shiro finally manages to leverage his eyelids up. “Shiro, you’re okay!”

Is he okay? Shiro’s not sure, but he knows he trusts this person, trusts the voice, and he settles from a scream to little whimpers.

“Shiro,” the person says, all black hair falling everywhere and eyes that beg him to settle, “Shiro, come on, you’re all right, you’re gonna be fine—”

“My hand,” Shiro says, between the whimpers.

“Yeah,” says the person, still comforting but almost as scared as Shiro, too. “Yeah, I know.”

Shiro’s eyes come into focus for the first time, and he remembers a name.

“Keith,” he says, “Keith, my hand.”

“Yeah,” says Keith. “But shhh, okay, you gotta be still. Pidge is taking care of you.”

“Hey,” says the other person crowding near him, the second voice. “Hey, I’m Pidge. I’m fixing you up, okay? I got the artery tied off so good news, you won’t bleed to death!”

“That’s…good,” says Shiro. “Keith—”

“Shh,” says Keith. He smoothes Shiro’s hair back from his forehead. “Shh, Shiro, we’re looking after you.”

Shiro tries. He tries not to whimper as the hands keep touching, keep bandaging his arm. But his hand, he thinks, what happened to his hand?

The question sticks with him as he drifts into uneasy sleep, dreaming about big monsters and his arm caught in their teeth. About being chased, knowing it was better him than Keith. About being caught, being hurt. And about his mother, too, with her long fingers and her soothing voice. Then about her chasing him too, about being so bad that even his mom is angry.

The next time he wakes, it’s sudden. Someone, a new voice, is yelling.

“It’s our room! You told us we could—”

And another new voice, angrier, not listening: “Didn’t tell you that you could steal my supplies, did I, you wretched little orphan brat? Get that beggar out—”

“We aren’t orphans!” That voice he’s heard before. Pidge? “And when we tell our dad what you’ve done to us, he’ll beat _your_ ass for a change!”

The angry voice overpowers all of them. “Get that beggar out! And as for you, I told you your dad don’t wanna hear from you! I’ve got your guardianship and I’ll do as I think best—”

“Don’t touch my sister, you bastard—”

There’s a resounding slap, then another. Shiro hears thuds, like people crumpling to the floor.

“Get him _out_ ,” the angry voice thunders, and then every other voice is small.

“Yes sir,” says somebody, and Shiro tries not to make much noise as the blanket he rests on is lifted up and as his arm, still aching wildly, falls onto his torso with a rush of white pain.


	2. Chapter 2

“Where do you stay,” Pidge is asking, desperately, when Keith tunes back in. They’re in the streets, he realizes. He’s not sure exactly where. On the blanket they carry, Shiro is whimpering in his sleep.

“Hey, fuckhead,” Pidge repeats. “I said, where do you stay?”

Keith rounds on her, angry, but he can’t put up a fight without setting Shiro down, so he tries to breathe through it. “Doesn’t matter,” he grits out. “It’s an attic. There’s no way we’ll get him up there.”

“I think we can manage a set of stairs,” Pidge shoots back. “We’ve carried him this far, haven’t we?”

“There aren’t stairs,” Keith says. “We climb a tree up to the window.”

“Oh,” says Pidge, and they both fall into silence. Shiro groans again.

Keith’s heart clenches. This is his fault, he remembers. He’s the one who messed up the plan. But he’s got to live with that now; he’s got to just keep going.

“Hey,” says Matt. He’s been carrying the tail end of the blanket, uncomplaining amidst Pidge’s endless barbs. “Can we take a break? I think this guy needs some water, and so do I.”

“Yeah,” says Keith, and carefully as they can, he and Matt lower the blanket to the ground. “Where are we?”

“Alfor Avenue, I think,” says Matt. “There should be a public well around that corner. Pidge, would you run and get some water?”

“Oh, and bring it back how?” Pidge demands. “It’s not like I can just steal the public bucket from the well and expect the guards to be like hey, sure, why not!”

Keith grimaces. “We’ll have to all go,” he says, and Matt agrees. They pick up the makeshift stretcher again, and Keith becomes aware of how keenly his arms are aching. And how hungry he is, too.

How long has it been since he ate? He can’t remember. They were almost out of supplies when they ran the operation that went wrong, and that was a good three days ago. Shiro was locked up for a while.

How long has it been since _Shiro_ ate? Keith doesn’t know much about the jailhouse, just rumors really, but he doubts there’s much provided to eat. If there were, more kids like him and Shiro would get themselves locked up for petty shit, shit smaller than stealing, just to have the occasional roof over their heads.

Keith doesn’t know much about feeding people with severe injuries, either, but he’s always heard you were supposed to give them like….broth. Toast. Easy things. What if Shiro can’t keep food down when he wakes? What if—

What if he dies.

Keith comes to a stop against the well and fights back stupid, stupid tears. He’s got to keep going. He’s got to pay Shiro back. Make Shiro proud of him again.

Okay, he thinks. Okay. First things first, water.

He and Matt set the stretcher down. Pidge is drawing the bucket up, and Keith moves towards her, his hands cupped to carry a little water to Shiro’s mouth. Matt lifts Shiro’s head, talking to him in a soothing voice until his mouth opens a little and Keith can dribble water in.

Shiro’s eyes flutter open, then shut. He does swallow the water, though, so Keith brings him some more before lifting a handful to his own lips.

“What next?” Pidge asks, water dripping down her face and shirt. “Your hideout’s a no-go; we already tried our place. What’s the options?”

Keith frowns. “Maybe under one of the bridges?”

“Could work,” Matt agrees. “Except we’re a good twenty-minute walk from the nearest one, I think.”

“Rest up and then go?” suggests Pidge.

“Maybe,” says Keith, “but we don’t want the guards noticing us. Loitering won’t get your hand cut off, but still—”

“Yeah,” says Matt. “We’ll just have to power through.”

Pidge grumbles, but not with too much fire. They all get another drink of water, and Keith gets Shiro to swallow a little, too. Then Matt and Keith heave up the blanket again, Pidge walking in front to clear a path.

“Hey!”

Keith’s head whirls, but he doesn’t see the guards.

“Yeah, you!” the voice calls again, and then there’s someone running up to them: not a guard, not even a grownup. It’s a kid about Keith’s age, with warm brown skin and a smile.

A smile? It makes Keith mad, even though he knows it doesn’t make sense. But nobody should be smiling when Shiro is hurt like this.

“What do you want?” he demands.

“You’re looking for someplace to stay, right?” the kid rattles off, faster than Keith thought it was possible for someone to talk. “My grandma lives just around here and I stay with her and she’s nice and oh, I’m Lance? My name’s Lance. I sell roses in the market sometimes or matches or whatever and anyway you can come back and stay with me and my grandma if you want!”

Keith’s still like three whole sentences back when Matt responds.

“Close, you said?”

“Yeah, just around that corner and then a block down.” Lance shoves his hands in his pockets and looks proud.

Matt nods. “We’ll go with you.”

“Matt,” Keith hisses, “no! What if it’s…what if it’s a trap?”

“Does he look like the kind of kid with anything to hide?” Matt smirks. “Sorry, Lance, but it’s true.”

“Hey,” Lance huffs. “I’m a real good liar!”

“If you were a good liar,” Pidge shoots back, “you’d say you weren’t!”

“Or maybe it’s a double lie,” Lance yells over her. “Maybe I knew you’d think that and—”

“All right!” Matt yells, louder still, and Keith winces when Shiro whines in pain at the noise. “Take us with you, Lance.”

Keith frowns some more. This is definitely a bad idea, trusting Shiro to some stranger. And Matt and Pidge are practically strangers, too! But who else is there? Usually it’s just Shiro and Keith, and Keith doesn’t know what to do about this. So he has to trust them, even if he hates it.

 He follows Pidge, who follows Lance, and Matt brings up the rear. The house is, as Lance promised, close; even at their slow pace, it takes less than five minutes to get to the door. Lance knocks cheerfully, then swings the door open to reveal a cramped but tiny one-room house.

“Grandma!” he calls out. “I brought friends!”

Friends? Keith’s ready to quarrel with that, but an older lady, rising from a battered rocking chair, is already hovering over them, drawing them in. She tuts over Shiro, who’s barely conscious, and gets them all to sit down. Matt settles on the hearth and Pidge on an upturned bucket, but Keith just plunks down on the floor next to Shiro and watches him.

He’s scared. He’s so scared.

Lance is darting around, gathering supplies, and his grandmother is easing herself down to look at Shiro. She checks his heartbeat, looks at the bandage. Tuts some more. Then she looks over at Keith.

“You’re his friend, huh, lad?”

Keith nods.

“Got no place to stay?”

Keith considers, then shrugs. The attic sort of counts, but—

“Not really.”

Lance’s grandmother frowns. “No food, either, I dare say. Look at you. Thin as a peeled stick.”

Keith thinks that’s hardly fair, seeing how thin she is herself, but even as a street kid he has better manners than to say that to someone who’s helping Shiro out.

“You get any sleep lately?”

“Uh,” says Keith. “Some.”

“Not a lot, I’ll wager.”

“No ma’am.”

“Worried about this one?”

“His name’s Shiro,” says Keith. It seems important to tell her.

“Shiro,” she repeats. “Well, don’t you worry, son. We’ll get Shiro through this.”

Keith nods. He’s not sure he can say anything without crying, so he just fidgets with his fingers and waits as the others, one-by-one, get pulled into various tasks. He should be helping too; he knows that. But he can’t get himself to do anything but stare at Shiro’s pale taut face, and wonder what he’ll do without him.

Eventually, Lance sits down next to him on the floor. “Shiro’s gonna be okay,” he says, without preamble. “You’ll see.”

Keith turns away. Some things, he thinks, can’t be mended. And even if Shiro survives, how will Keith face his anger?

Lance puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder, and this time Keith doesn’t resist. He lowers his head, closes his eyes.

Behind his eyelids, the axe comes down.

 

\----

 

Next time Shiro wakes, he still doesn’t know where he is.

And what’s more, he’s alone. Or he thinks he is. It’s quiet, dark. He opens his eyes and he still can’t really see anything, just a faint glow—a candle maybe—in the corner.

He’s inside. He’s in a place with corners, which could be the attic, but he’s also in a place with candles, which are things he and Keith never bother to steal.

Where is he?

Shiro feels panic growing inside him, a large and wild creature. Where is he? Where’s _Keith_?

He could be in the jailhouse still, he realizes, and that just makes him hyperventilate until he realizes that no, no, he’s lying on something softer than the jailhouse floor. A blanket, maybe even a mattress. He’s got a wad of fabric tucked under his head, too.

So not the jailhouse. The floor, when he reaches out his left hand to touch it, is dirt, not stone. Okay, Shiro thinks, okay. He doesn’t know where he is, but he’s not locked up. That’s something.

Then, gradually, as the rest of his mind clicks into gear and the panic shrinks again, he becomes aware of the pain. His right arm is throbbing so brightly he swears he can almost see it glow.

No. No, that’s the candle, coming closer, hovering—in someone’s hand, then.

“Shiro?”

He doesn’t know the voice and the panic-creature starts to grow again, thrashing against the wall of his chest. “Keith,” he gasps out. “Where’s Keith?”

“Keith’s sleeping,” says the voice. The candle comes closer yet and settles on the floor; the person who owns the voice is sitting down next to Shiro’s head.

“Who are you,” Shiro demands. He tries to make it sound threatening, because what if this person did something to Keith? But he’s not sure he manages. And fuck, his arm—

“Matt,” says the person, as if that explains everything. “Look, I’m a surgeon’s apprentice. Keith needed some help with you after that whole ordeal in the square.”

Shiro blinks hard. Once, twice, as if it’ll clear the fog from his mind. “I don’t have any money.”

“What?”

“I can’t—” It’s hard to talk. His arm _hurts_. Shiro’s had his share of bumps and bruises and the occasional blow from a guard, but he’s never felt anything like this. “I can’t pay.”

Matt laughs. “Don’t worry about it. I’m hardly an expert, anyway. And to be honest, I was pretty desperate for an excuse to get Pidge away from that asshole.”

“What asshole?” Shiro still doesn’t understand very much. He wishes he did. “Who’s Pidge? Where am I? Where’s Keith?”

“The asshole is the surgeon we work for. Pidge is my sister. You’re at, uh, a friend’s house? Lance? Do you know Lance? Keith is asleep. He looked like he hadn’t gotten any rest in a goddamn week, so we made him go to bed. I can wake him up if you want, though?”

“No,” says Shiro. “No, don’t wake him up.”

And then he dares it. He asks the question he doesn’t want an answer to.

“What happened to my arm?”

Matt is quiet. All Shiro can hear is his own desperate breathing.

“Please,” he says.

“You got arrested,” Matt finally answers. “Do you remember that?”

“Yeah,” Shiro mutters, ashamed. “Stealing.”

“Yeah,” says Matt. “They, uh—they cut off your hand in the square.”

Oh.

Yeah, he remembers now.

The axe, and being afraid, being afraid that they’d miss and cut him somewhere else, or that they’d changed their minds and decided to execute him right there. The axe flashing up and coming down and metal-on-bone. He remembers the sound of it more than he remembers the feeling. That’s lucky, probably, he thinks, but he can’t bring himself to be grateful for it, for anything.

“Did Keith,” he gasps out, because now he _really_ can’t breathe. “Did Keith see?”

Silence again. His own ragged breaths.

“Yeah,” Matt confesses. “He was there. But it’s a good thing he was, okay? They—the guards, they would’ve left you to bleed out.”

Oh. Oh, okay.

Shiro feels nausea climbing his throat. With an effort, then with Matt’s help, he gets half-turned onto his side and just heaves, bile coming up and burning, choking on his spit and the air he tries to pull in.

“Hey,” Matt murmurs, soothing and hushed. “Hey, yeah, breathe, okay? In—out—in—”

Shiro tries. He manages to get some breaths, at least, in between the sobs and the heaving. He feels stupid, tears streaking his face, the arms of someone he doesn’t even know wrapping around him. It isn’t right. He’s supposed to be on top of things; he’s supposed to be the one making everything okay. But he can’t, he can’t, he can’t even make himself okay. Not right now.

So he pushes away the guilt as best he can and lets Matt hold him, because it’s better than being alone.

 

 ----

 

Keith wakes to the sound of crying. Instantly jerked to full awareness, he scrambles up from the bit of floor he claimed earlier and makes his way across the tiny room to the candle on the floor, where someone—Matt?—is holding Shiro.

“What’s wrong?” he demands, as quietly as he can.

Matt hushes him, but Shiro’s already lifted his head.

“Keith?”

“Yeah,” Keith breathes, half-collapsing to sit on the floor near him. “Yeah, I’m here, I’m so sorry, Shiro, fuck, I’m so sorry—”

Shiro shakes his head. “No,” he gasps out between sobs, “no, me, I’m sorry.”

“This sounds like a dilemma,” Matt says, and his tone is laughing but his face is kind and soft in the candlelight. “How about this: neither of you needs to be sorry. Huh?”

Keith swallows. “But—”

“Shh,” says Matt. “Keith, can you get Shiro some water?”

Keith scrambles up again and goes for the bucket in the corner. He fills the cup that sits next to it and hurries back to Shiro.

“Small sips, okay?” Matt says, as Keith brings the cup up for Shiro.

They spend a couple minutes like that, Shiro sipping slowly at the water while Keith watches him intently and Matt models calm breathing. When the cup is empty, Shiro takes a deep breath.

“I’m okay,” he says. “Keith, you should—you should go back to sleep.”

“Like hell,” says Keith. “I shouldn’t have gone to sleep in the first place!”

“You have to take care of yourself,” Shiro urges. His eyes are intense, glinting. “Keith. Come on. Did you eat while I was locked up? Did you—”

“Stop it,” Keith hisses. “Stop it, okay, don’t talk to me about taking care of myself when this is my fault, mine, okay, it’s my fault this happened to you and _you_ should’ve taken care of yourself, you asshole, not gone off taking the blame, and I shouldn’t have let you get hurt for me, fuck—”

He takes in a deep, desperate breath of his own. He’s crying now, too. Fuck.

“Keith,” Shiro is saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I went and got myself hurt and made you have to take care of me—”

“It’s not that,” Keith sobs. “It’s—I deserved it. I’m the one who messed up the plan. It should be me. And you, you shouldn’t have to take care of me when I fuck up.”

“I didn’t want it to be you,” Shiro says. “I want to take care of you, okay?”

“I want to take care of you too.” Keith swallows hard. “So don’t—don’t go sacrificing yourself anymore, okay?”

Shiro shrugs. “It was my choice, Keith. Please, just let this be my choice.”

“But why,” Keith says.

Shiro doesn’t answer. He just shakes his head, smiles weakly, and closes his eyes. He’s still exhausted, Keith realizes, still in pain. It’s not a time to argue.

“Like I said,” says Matt, as he helps Shiro lie down again. “Nobody needs to be sorry.”

Keith thinks about that. Then he reaches for Shiro’s remaining hand, squeezing it gently.

Shiro’s eyes flutter back open. “Hey,” he says, clearly struggling to speak. But he’s smiling. “Keith?”

“Yeah,” says Keith. “I’m here.”

“I’m proud of you,” Shiro whispers, and then he falls asleep with Keith’s hand in his.


End file.
